Today I made a tough decision, I decided to accept google ads so I can upgrade my servers. I was horrified to see the first advert to appear was for an American company spreading misinformation about drugs, I find this particularly offensive because I’m aware that misinformation about drugs may well kill infinitely more people than drugs themselves. I’ll provide the evidence for that statement in this blog post and I’ll also explain why a multi-billion dollar industry is paying advertisers to feed you misinformation about drugs.

My instinctive response was to block the advertiser but I can’t censor every unscrupulous advertiser that Google pops on my site so I’ve decided to be up front about this, give you the factsand let you join the dots. If a product has to be marketed heavily you should already be suspicious, if information has to be marketed you should be down right terrified. By all means see what they’ve got to say, but never trust claims that are not backed up with evidence that is reported elsewhere and always check the sources. Internet advertising is not like television advertising which has basic quality controls. Anyone can pay to put an advert online and you must consider what their motivation is. I’ll do my bit by ensuring all adverts are clearly labelled so you don’t get them confused with content.

Mephedrone is a recently synthesised drug that was initially quite unpopular due it’s relatively unpleasant after effects. To date noonly one coroner world wide has ever formally attributed a death to Mephedrone. In 2008, a profoundly ridiculous story by vice magazine popularised Mephedrone after the reporter claimed to insuffulate six grams of the drug. For a start this was criminally irresponsible as this drug has never been tested on humans and this is nearly a hundred times the dose recommended by users (who will recommend it to be taken orally anyway). Not even Charlie Sheen would go “banging seven gram rocks” of this stuff let alone suggest it in a magazine read by those with a collective reading age of a boiled egg. For the record no one should “bang” seven grams of anything, ever, unless they happen to be a beetle (the bugs not the rockstars).

Despite these crazy reports, despite the substance being shipped by the kilo after it’s shoot to star status by the red tops, despite the excesses never seen with ecstasy, no coroner in the UK has ever attributed a death to mephedrone. In March 2010 two men died after taking Government issue heroin substitute, Methadone. The Daily Fail wrongly reported this as Mephedrone and the red tops followed suit. If this was a typo it was a very convenient typo that was never corrected. The police swallowed the tabloid bait hook, line and sinker and disregarded desperate pleas by drug experts to wait for the post-mortem and held an international press conference that day declaring parliament must act to make mephedrone illegal. Like lap dogs the Government got right down to it, basing the decision on evidence which by that point had been confirmed by their own police force, coroner and Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to be misinformation. By the point of the decision so many of the remaining Goverment experts on the ACMD had resigned in protest that the council was completely legally defunct. (Which actually technically makes the ban defunct according do the Misuse of Drugs Act. Don’t quote me on that, I’m not a lawyer. This is incidentally, why the law is being changed to make the ACMD irrelevant)

Edit: Some people thought the above was a joke. This is no joke. Endless chemicals and their hypothetical derivatives that do not exist yet are now illegal only because if they existed they would be similar to drugs that are far safer than alcohol and tobacco and in the case of mephedrone because it sounded like methadone. There was no scientific consultation and no research is planned. Intelligent, honest, hard working people who care about their personal health are rapidly being pushed either in to the criminality of illegal drugs or the unknown artificially accelerating frontiers of “legal highs”. This policy has the unfortunate side effect of categorically preventing new frontiers in medicine.

Below is a report by the RSA that references a wealth of research that demonstrates that the Government’s current method of restricting information and promoting the “Just Say No” message actually increases drug use. It concludes that the only way to reduce the dangers of drugs is to provide accurate and balanced information on drugs.

Accurate and honest information on drugs can be found on the website of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, made up of former members of the ACMD who resigned in protest at the lies they were expected to tell. Due to the fact that academic research on recreational use is effectively prohibited by law and the Government’s FRANK website doesn’t actually contain any useful information, the crowd sourced data bank “Erowid” remains one of the only sources for drug information.

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